17th September 2007

London, UK – September 17th , 2007 – Fluency Voice Technology, (www.fluencyvoice.com) the packaged speech recognition solutions company, today spoke out about the growing interest in Speaker Verification or Voice Biometrics and asks whether this is a winning use of intelligent speech recognition or the symptom of a world gone a bit paranoid.

Call center managers and customer services directors won’t have failed to notice the hype surrounding Voice Biometrics but is it just that, hype? Identity theft and unauthorized access to account information are on the rise with some serious ramifications to individuals and institutions. As regulatory pressure looms both here and in the US for increased security and two-factor authentication, call center executives are scrambling to find out more about Voice Biometrics and whether the time is indeed right to embrace this technology in an attempt to be a step ahead of the next great leap in the fight against identity fraud.

Fluency’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr Jacob Abboud takes a pragmatic approach to voice biometrics. In a forthcoming seminar timed to co-incide with the CC Expo event in Birmingham, Jacob and the Fluency team will attempt to demystify the subject of voice biometrics and delve deep into the implications, considerations and timing for call centers.

At the seminar, Jacob will warn that, while the technology is good and ready and shows immense potential, organisations must be careful to balance the various requirements of accuracy and reliability, usability and cost to ensure a successful deployment that must ultimately be based on a risk assessment of the ‘value’ of the information to be accessed or action to be taken. Solutions that require tedious enrollment sessions as customers ‘train’ the application to recognise their voices through a voice-print, may demotivate customers by presenting them with yet another hurdle they have to jump in order to use the system effectively and transparently.

At the same time, as long as ‘false accepts’ (where the system grants access to a person that should have been rejected) lurk practically at the 3-5% mark on voice biometrics, which they do with many systems today, the technology is not 100% safe to be used in isolation. Instead, it is best to combine what the caller ‘is’, i.e. biometrics with what the caller ‘knows’ using standard identification and verification (ID&V) customer screening techniques.

Jacob comments, “These are all serious considerations for customer service managers seeking to drive the next wave of fraud protection into their self-service applications. It is important to deploy a solution that is going to satisfy security concerns, customer usability and potentially regulatory compliance in a way that can seamlessly integrate to existing infrastructure and call centre technologies.”

To find out more about Voice Biometrics and what it means to your call center, visit www.fluencyvoice.com/seminar and register for the Fluency seminar which is being held on

Wednesday 26th of September Gallery Restaurant, located above Call Centre Expo, Hall 8 NEC Birmingham 10:30 to 12:30 including lunch

Register to book your FREE place today at www.fluencyvoice.com/seminar

For more information on Fluency and our packaged speech recognition solutions please visit, www.fluencyvoice.com.

About Fluency Voice Technology

Fluency provides on-premise and hosted packaged speech recognition solutions for call centers.

Fluency’s speech recognition solutions are used by call centers to improve customer service and significantly reduce costs. These call centers come to us because of the unique way we package and provide our speech solutions, which ensures a rapid, inexpensive, trouble-free rollout. Our configurable speech recognition solutions are delivered via the VSA™ Suite. VSA provides a range of applications which can be deployed individually or collectively to automate call center workflows. Each VSA deployment is fully configurable, allowing customers to make changes in response to business needs.

Fluency has offices in the UK and the USA. For more information please visit the corporate website on www.fluencyvoice.com.